White Sound
by kyrilu
Summary: White Sound: a steady, unwavering, unobtrusive noise, as an electronically produced drone or the sound of the rain, used to mask or obliterate unwanted sounds. Doctor/Master.


Title: White Sound  
>Author: kyrilu<br>Fandom: Doctor Who, brief mention of Torchwood: Children of Earth  
>Rating: T<br>Genre: Angst/Drama  
>Summary: White Sound [noun]: a steady, unwavering, unobtrusive noise, as an electronically produced drone or the sound of the rain, used to mask or obliterate unwanted sounds. An AU, Post-The Last of the Time Lords. Doctor-centric, implied DoctorMaster that probably got lost in Ten's angst.  
>AN: I started this with a better middle and ending in mind, but then I just kind of lost it. Urgh. I wanted to expand more on Letti, but I didn't really know how to go on that. This is pretty much like the fic 'Parallax' I wrote, except slightly different.

i.  
>The Doctor pulls at a lever at the control panel with one hand, the other carefully rotating a crank. His tongue swipes across his lips as he concentrates on the rhythm of the motion: <em>switch up-rotate clockwise-switch down-switch down-rotate counterclockwise-rotate clockwise-switch up...<em>

His head is cocked sideways, his ears listening to the sounds of the TARDIS. Every whir, ever creak, every groan of the machinery is a tell-tale song that guides him.

"Where to, girl?" he whispers, softly - as of late, he has taken to lowering his usually loud voice. Being alone, the silence is so deafening, and the echoes of his chatter more so.

The ship, of course, does not respond.

With a sigh, the Doctor flips on the Impossibility Drive, setting the course to some place random.

ii.  
><em>And at night, the Doctor dreamswill dream/dreamed of fire._

iii.  
>A dirty rag-wearing girl collapses in front of the police box's door. Her eyes are round and wide-eyed with fear, but as she falls, she imploringly looks at the Doctor and rasps, "Help me."<p>

The (last of the) Time Lord hurries to her side. His mouth is set in grim determination, knowing that once again, it has begun.

"It's all right," he tells the young woman as she stirs awake, "you can trust me. I'm the Doctor." He wipes her mud-streaked face with a coarse rag (he'd used it for previous occasions to clean up the TARDIS's dusty interior), noting her sharp bright eyes and her careworn hands.

The girl inhales a slow, steady breath. "Doctor. Are you in the medical field?"

He shrugs. "I suppose you can say that."

She blinks at the vague answer, but questions him no further. "Well, whoever you are, Doctor, thank you. It was kind of you not to just leave me lying here."

"It wouldn't have been very gentlemanly of me at all!" he exclaims, beaming at her happily. "And I didn't get your name there, Miss...?"

"Just call me Letti. I'm merely a student at the school here, so you needn't bother with any 'ma'am's or 'missus's." She self-consciously brushes a hand through her filthy knotted hair, shuddering in disgust; the Doctor catches but ignores her muted swear.

"_Well_," the Doctor says, holding the word long and loud like a musical note. "_Well_, Just-call-me-Letti, I suppose we are acquainted."

Letti laughs, and it's good laugh, a nice laugh. It's neither soft nor rough nor low nor high - it is in between, and it is a comforting simplicity.

"We don't get many visitors to the school, you know," says the girl, privately deciding that she likes this stranger. "Are you an inspector or something of the sort?"

"Ah yes. Here, let me show you."

He whips out his 'credentials', displaying psychic paper before her eyes. "Go on, go on. Aren't I impressive?"

Letti opens and closes her mouth in amazement. "'Doctor and Scholar of Automaton Institute'...'Greatest Recognized Engineer and Pioneer in the Field of Steam&Clockworks'...goodness, William will be really impressed! He's been dying for you polished-buckets to finally get off your sleek-trolleys and patent his stuff."

Carefully phrasing his words, the Doctor replies, "Of course. Why don't you show me around?

"_Well_, not here, really. Just a forest. Though it's a nice forest - quite a handsome oak over there, if I do say so myself. Oh bother, it's probably not an oak...redwood? pine? sequoia? snozzberry? liliaputarian?

"Um, uh, I _actually_ don't know. But anyways, I meant the school. _Well_, of course I meant the school - oh never mind."

Letti looks at him and smiles, and leads him through a path through a thick woodland. Here, the trees emerge around them like waves in a wild sea, and the Doctor thinks it strange that they still grow. On this planet, in the far future, there is only metal-cities, powered by steam and clockwork intricacies.

He almost wants to hold his hand out to the grey-sky (grey, it's always grey here) and wait for clockwork butterflies land on his fingers. They always flocked to people - tick-tock tick-tock - mechanisms working, gears turning, pendulums swinging, tick-tock tick-tock, rhythms, beats, skies, grass, Gallifrey, run Doctor, run Doctor, run...

The Doctor sucks in a breath; he's breathing all wrong. He thinks to himself that there is no clockwork butterflies at this time period, and that it's better not to think hard at all.

The look Letty giving him is thoughtful. Her gaze makes the Doctor uneasy; he isn't used to silence or plain, calm walking.

"So what happened that got you in such a sorry state?" The Doctor gestures to Letti's tattered and torn violet dress, smeared with mud-streaks.

(Good. He did it. He broke the silence. Talk now. Talk talk talk talk talk. Don't think just run don't listen too long don't think.)

The young woman raises her eyebrows. "An experiment, of course. You know how mad those can get."

The Doctor tugs an unexpected smile from his lips - T_here once was a boy who so hated and loved me so much that he kept upsetting my experiments._ "Yes. Yes, of course," he says, blinking so fast to try and shake the memories away.

And before he can stop himself, the Doctor says, "Have you ever considered butterflies?"

iv.

_And at night, the Doctor dreams/will dream/dreamed of fire._

v.

Several years later, the Doctor returns to the clockwork planet. He finds that Letti is dead, murdered, and William Golden (charming Liam, eyes as warm as his namesake, mind as sharp as the strongest sword) was the one who did so.

There is a mystery there, strung alongside all mysteries like planets in the sky.

There are clockwork plans at work, sure and strong and certain, and the Doctor cannot interfere because of the events that must unfold. Some things, he must turn away from. Some things, he must flee.

All of this evolved from the clockwork butterfly that he set in motion, the Doctor thinks, watching a mechanical spider scuttle past him.

Understanding these things now helps him later when he pops in on Earth a little time in the future, hearing the children talking the words of child-killers in unison: We are coming. We are coming. Understanding these things now helps him watch the government, the supposed protector of its people, try to deal the fate of innocents, puppeteers and meddlers weaving a web of mass slaughter and trickery.

(_Go away, go away_, says his instincts as he struggles to change the world. _Why won't you let me let me go please i have to help them all please please._ And he breathes, and feels a paradox forming at his fingertips.)

Oh, _Jack_.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

vi.

_And at night, the Doctor dreams/will dream/dreamed of fire._

vii.

He's looking for something, and he doesn't think he'll stop until he finds it.

In a flash of pain, the Doctor remembers wishing desperately, clinging to a hope: Please, you're all there's left; don't you see that all we've got is each other?

Don't you _ever_ see?

viii.

_And at night, the Doctor dreams/will dream/dreamed of fire._

ix.

The Doctor does the only thing that he's ever known.

He runs.

There are so many skies stretched before him, behind him, beside him. He throws himself out at them, wrapping himself in all their complexities that Time offers him, and he is not afraid.

On Algrant, he stops a dam from breaking, saving the planet from flooding. The Doctor confronts the aliens who sabotaged it, and sinks their watercraft into the dark depths beneath.

On Earth, the year 2000, he successfully minimises the effects of the Y2K virus, which alien-hackers (he's not actually sure what sort of species they were - some sort of humanoid-AI-thing shaped like ferrets or weasels or something like that) programmed to knock out and take over all human technology. To them, he emails into their heads loads of spam, flooding them until they short-circuited out.

On the seventh moon of Lorainsa, the Doctor breaks the arm of the leader of invading savages, then continuing to blow up their spaceship. They killed a friend he found there, and therefore, a chance for a sort of sanity.

When the life of innocents are threatened on Earth, the 15th century, the Doctor increases the settings on his sonic screwdriver and aims it at a murderer. He thinks of all the people - friends, precious companions - that he's lost, and he doesn't hesitate in pressing a button.

And somewhere, the Doctor scratches a promise in the walls of a castle, words intertwining into English and Gallifreyan. Letters curve into the flowing patterns of the ancient language, arching in between loops and spirals.

Then the promise is lost in the chaos of words he has surrounded around them: fire and burning and gone and so many, many more.

The Doctor touches a single finger to the wall and lets it run over the word sorry. He touches it again, softly, before taking out a handkerchief and scrubbing the ink away.

The only thing left is a dark smear, blotching a patch of the wall a heavy black.

x.

_And at night, the Doctor dreams/will dream/dreamed of fire._

xi.

The Doctor stands in a TARDIS, peering at its mechanisms in wonder. He can't help but admire its design template: all blackness, with dots of lights scattered over the walls and ceiling.

Stars, the Doctor smiles to himself.

In the centre of the room, a TARDIS console glows like a sun, rays faintly emitting from its core. A metal-helmet protrudes from the ceiling, and the Doctor examines it with a grim expression.

There are tightly shuttered windows in this TARDIS - one-way. The Doctor turns one of the blinds at an angle to peer outside.

The Silver Devastation.

"I think it's time," the Doctor whispers. He retrieves a battered old lighter from his pocket, pausing to look at it in reminiscence. Fitz. He'd found the thing in one of the leather jackets his former companion had left behind, the selfsame jacket he'd used in his last regeneration.

The Doctor thinks of his old self, briefly. Sad and angry and bitter. He thinks of all of them: being old and young, cold and gentle, the same and different.

He thinks of Time and Space running perpendicular and parallel and all ways in between, because they are not linear and not-not linear, and nothing can define them.

And he looks again at the false stars all around him; and he laughs and laughs and laughs. He flicks on the lighter and lights the light of his dreams.

Then the Doctor closes his eyes and lets the fire eat away all his lives, past and present and future, but before the flames even touch him, he knows that there is nothing to take at all.

xii.

_At at night..._

End.


End file.
